“You just never know who it could have been,” Rushing said. “It could have been another ghost who stopped off in Grand Junction.”

In the years to come, oil shale discoveries would make Grand Junction a thriving community that quickly swelled in size. The local economy got stronger.

Rushing tracked down scores of leads but none of them materialized into a good enough lead to make an arrest. The apartment complex where Tomlinson lived was occupied by Mesa College students and young people who included a Grand Junction police officer who lived in the floor above her.

Two years after Tomlinson was murdered, Rushing quit the police department and he and a friend started a car business. Generations of detectives have since come and gone.

A few have chased some strong leads in the Tomlinson murder but no arrests were made.

When he investigated the case, there was blood typing but no DNA testing. Over the past decades he has been anticipating that a DNA match would be how Tomlinson’s killer would be caught.

It hasn’t happened, but he still thinks that is one of many different ways the case could be solved.

“It’s going to be a death-bed confession,” he said. Or a final key piece of evidence will surface like the pivotal card in a poker hand.

Days before he was executed in Florida, Bundy told authorities about a girl he had kidnapped, murdered and dumped in a river near Grand Junction.

Officials believe he was referring to Oliverson. By the time Tomlinson was murdered in her apartment Bundy would have been in jail.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.